and in both cases had no issues uncompressing the kernels into the /tmp directory. Also had no issues uncompressing the kernels when the compression option in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf was set to gzip and bzip2.

Re: Kernel uncompression error on startup

the mkinitcpio.conf compression method is probably not the issue if uncompression of the kernel itself, not the initramfs, fails.You can't change the compression mode of the kernel except by compiling it yourself, but that shouldn't cause any issues either.

Re: Kernel uncompression error on startup

the mkinitcpio.conf compression method is probably not the issue if uncompression of the kernel itself, not the initramfs, fails.

I agree, I just wanted to be as thorough as possible when relaying what debugging steps I'd already taken. I've updated the topic to something less confusing.

I think you could rule that out by commenting out the 'INITRD' lines in your syslinux.cfg. It would still fail to boot but at least you should get different error when the kernel continued booting until it couldn't load the module for your root block device.

Re: Kernel uncompression error on startup

ooo wrote:

I think you could rule that out by commenting out the 'INITRD' lines in your syslinux.cfg. It would still fail to boot but at least you should get different error when the kernel continued booting until it couldn't load the module for your root block device.

This resulted in the same exact result - no additional and/or different errors.

ooo wrote:

Is this a fresh installation, or did it just break all of a sudden? in which case did you check that latest packages upgraded before the breakage from /var/log/pacman.log?

you could try linux-lts kernel too, if you haven't already, to rule out any regressions in latest arch kernels.

It just broke all of a sudden. The kernel hadn't been updated. I rebooted the VM instance for some reason or another (but NOT after a package update) and then it wouldn't boot.

I'm starting to think there might be an issue with the external drive the VMs are stored on. I have a number of Arch VMs on that disk, and none of them will open now, all complaining about issues uncompressing the kernel.

I tried creating a new VM on that disk, and was seeing errors with /dev/sda1 almost immediately. However, I've mapped /dev/sda3 as Windows drive in VMWare Workstation and am copying files to a new VM (in VirtualBox, on a different drive).

I've had no issues copying files off the mapped drive though, so it's not clear what the problem is. I seem to be having issues only with /boot partitions, and only in VMware. Bizarre.

I saw this same issue with LTS kernels, too, BTW. They're not on the current /boot partition but they were on the previous iteration.